Principal Investigator(s):Finkelhor, David, University of New Hampshire; Hotaling, Gerald, University of Lowell; Sedlak, Andrea, Westat, Inc.

Summary:

This collection was undertaken in response to the mandate of the
1984 Missing Children Act. The objective of the act was to estimate the
incidence of five categories of children: children abducted by family
members, children abducted by nonfamily members, runaways, thrownaways
(those not wanted by their families or taken from families because of abuse
or neglect), and children considered missing. Data were collected by
several different methods. The centerpiece of this collection is a
hou... (more info)

This collection was undertaken in response to the mandate of the
1984 Missing Children Act. The objective of the act was to estimate the
incidence of five categories of children: children abducted by family
members, children abducted by nonfamily members, runaways, thrownaways
(those not wanted by their families or taken from families because of abuse
or neglect), and children considered missing. Data were collected by
several different methods. The centerpiece of this collection is a
household survey (Parts 19, 20, and 35) that interviewed families to
determine whether any children fit the categories under study. Basic
demographic information on age, race, and sex was collected, and questions
on the family situation were asked of identified children and their parents
and siblings. A survey of juvenile facilities (Parts 28 and 29) was also
conducted to determine how many children had run away from these
facilities. Facility administrators were prompted for demographic
information on the runaways as well as for information on the structure of
the runaways' families. In addition, a survey of returned runaways
(children who had run away and returned home) (Part 30) was completed to
find out whether children's accounts of runaway episodes matched the
accounts given by their parents. Children were queried about their
relationships with their parents and their views of their contributions to
the family. They were also asked about each specific runaway episode:
whether they actually ran away or were asked to leave, how long the episode
lasted, whether friends knew about it, whether friends accompanied them,
whether they used drugs before, during, or after the episode, how they were
found, where they were found, and whether disciplinary action was taken.
The police records component (Parts 31-33) contains information on
homicides, abductions, and sexual assaults.

(1) ICPSR originally received 27 separate rectangular files
for the household survey. Twenty-five of these files were combined and
sorted into one hierarchical file, Part 35, Household Hierarchical Data.
The hierarchical file has 140,611 records, 2,175
variables, and a logical record length of 386. One record was deleted from
record type 06, the ABNM Segment, because it contained only missing data.
The other two household rectangular files appear separately, as Part 19,
Institution and Child Link Segment Data, and Part 20, Institution Type Data.
(2) The part numbers begin with Part 19.

Methodology

Sample:
(1) The sample for the household survey was generated through
computerized random-digit dialing. (2) The sample for the juvenile
facilities was generated by asking respondents in the household survey if
any child in the family had lived in some type of facility such as a
boarding school for at least two weeks in the previous year. A juvenile
facility in the sample had a probability of being nominated in proportion
to the number of children in the facility from telephone households. (3)
The sample for the returned runaway file was constituted from the household
survey. Households indicating a returned runaway incident were included in
this sample. (4) The police records survey was conducted from a stratified
random sample based upon region of country, level of urbanization, and
population by age.

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Performed consistency checks.

Standardized missing values.

Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Version(s)

Original ICPSR Release:1992-03-04

Version History:

1996-11-21 SAS and SPSS data definition statements, formerly
distributed in multiple files, have been concatenated into single
files.